Attempting an erotics of performance (2020)

Video essay, performance documentation

feat. Kyle Bruckmann, oboe & music; with Walker Olesen, video production & direction

Constituted from footage salvaged from a canceled project workshop in early-March 2020, Attempting an erotics of performance features improviser, composer, oboist, and close musical collaborator Kyle Bruckmann performing music previously composed by me as well as his own improvisations and shot in various degrees of proximity.

The workshop in March 2020 was to be the initial meeting of a commissioned project for the woodwind quintet Splinter Reeds and Indexical/Radius Gallery in Santa Cruz, California. Shortly before the band was supposed to fly into Oakland, California instated its COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, beginning a period which halted all in-person performing arts-related projects indefinitely and perhaps will mark the culture of contemporary music—and all culture—for the foreseeable future.

This video essay serves to explicate a line of inquiry I began years ago: what are the “erotics of sound production?” To me, it’s the centering of the physical body/bodies in music-making, the intense physicality that is the foundation of musical performance. It is the sense that the empathic and powerful “immediacy” we feel when we see and hear a performance is actually the intersection of the base, grotesqueness of the physical form and the higher, artistic, and intellectual form — a third “site” in the realm of the experiential. Consider the following quote from Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin:

Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world (Rabelais and his World, 1965).

If we simply consider the “erotic,”one may immediately think of sex. That’s fine. It’s physical, it’s basic—literally (nb. a reference to Georges Bataille’s “base materialism” and Mikhail Bakhtin’s “grotesque body”). But an aesthetic reading of the word might tend towards “sensuality,” a tactile sensuousness: touch, breath, force of gesture, or utterance. As a composer, it’s how attune I am/we are to these things that create sound and how we can organize, arrange, or manipulate them to create a musical situation where the vitality of being a flesh-and-bone human being can be felt—by the performer and the audience.

As a composer, I don’t necessarily perform anymore. But the erotics of producing sound, because It centers bodies, also encompasses the intense relationships that I have with the people I compose for/with. Outside of music, personal relationships are what sustain me, nourish me. They are intense, trusting, intimate, and consensual. In my musical practice, it’s the same.